Masks in the Woods

John Tynes, a tabletop RPG developer well-known for work on products for Pagan Publishing and Wizards of the Coast, has a piece in this week's Escapist about the power of the tabletop roleplaying experience. He compares it to the experience of roleplaying in a Massive game, and finds it lacking. From the article: "There is no golden age here. There's just another group of players who tried to tell some stories and couldn't bend the tools to their will. The tools even made things harder in some cases - as in the contentious area of IC vs. OOC chat. Endsong says the guild started with local chat being in character. But more and more members switched to using voice communication via TeamSpeak. If you thought roleplaying online via text messages was a challenge, try it with a headset." Please note - this article contains some disturbing descriptions. No sarcasm, reader beware.

Comments

In-character consistency in voice chat?

[ScentCone]

Certainly the number of people playing as Trolls should make for lots of completely believable communication.

And they don't even mention LARPing...

[GJSchaller]

I will start off by saying I'm one of those guys who actually wears a mask in the woods, and plays a game that involves mock combat / sparring using padded weapons. When I saw the title of this article, that is what I thought it was about. It's a shame that they don't even touch on it. (Disclamier - I had to skim TFA, I'm at a work computer and some of the graphics on the site are not... office friendly.)

I do agree that Role-Playing is much easier to do at the tabletop than online, or on a PC. I've been playing Tabletop RPGs since I was 10, over 20 years ago. In the past 5 years, that has given way to Live Role-Playing Games (Also know as Live-Action RPGs, or LARPs), where there is no tabletop, but everything is acted out in real-time. Some times it's in a hotel room, some times it's in a whole hotel, and sometimes (my favorite) it's on a campgrounds, where you have a large expanse of outdoors to play in.

Don't get me wrong, WoW is fun - but it's not RP in my mind. RP is watching your best friend (acting the part of) breaking down in tears in a dramatic scene, live - not using /cry. Good RP is actually feeling a lump in your throat as you see a zombie (actually a player in makeup) shamble towards you, knowing it won't stop just because you ran out of it's spawn range. And truly memorable is when your S.O. scares the holy crap out of you by simply smiling on a dimly lit woodland path. The fact that you didn't know she was there, she's a Dark Elf in all black, on a moonless night, and all you can see is her teeth and fangs adds to the atmosphere. (I'd like to see a Night Elf try that online.)

At the risk of sounding like a promotion, check out http://gallery.knightrealms.com/ - Yes, I'm the webmaster, so it's my own damn fault if we get slashdotted. ;-)

This can't come as any surprise

[fair_n_hite_451]

Face-to-face roleplaying brings body language, facial expressions, voice pitch and human interaction to the table (pun intended).

Not sure how on-line roleplaying ... until we reach the nirvana of immersive 3D, holodeck-like technology ... will ever compete with that.

His whole article can be summed up like this:
"I went to a marionette show, and you know what, movies look more realistic."